Interview with Eva Heil, Managing Director of GMX

As a follow-up to our review of GMX, we reached out to GMX for an interview. A month later, we finally got our interview questions answered.

We found quite a few problems with GMX when we reviewed it last month. What does GMX have to say in it’s defence? We contacted Eva Heil, Managing Director of GMX, to find out.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I have to say it has been an exciting journey with GMX. Since I started with the company in June of 1999 as the head of marketing, I have really been able to see GMX develop into the service it is today. Prior to GMX, I worked with 1&1 Internet, their sister company, in marketing and advertising where my focus was managing campaigns for B2B and B2C communications.

How long has GMX been around?
GMX launched in the U.S. in January of 2008. It has been around in Germany and across Europe though for over 10 years and is the digital homebase now for more than 10 million users.

How many employees do you have?
GMX is a major branch of United Internet and a sister company to 1&1 Internet and Fasthosts Internet, the web hosting affiliate companies. The Group has over 3,500 employees at locations in North America, Europe and Asia.

We posted a review of your service recently. Unfortunately the reviewer was not overwhelmingly pleased with his experience. His primary concern was the slow load-time of the page and that it was generally crash-prone (which often rendered in German-error messages). What are you guys doing to change this?
To start, we operate GMX on state-of-the-art servers in order to provide our users with the best service possible. This also means we perform periodical maintenance checks to keep our equipment updated and bug-free. Beyond our servers however, elements beyond our control, like a user’s Web browser, Internet connection or browser settings, can also affect their experience with GMX. So while we do our very best to prevent any downtime for our customers, we also try and educate our users on what they can do to ensure they have the optimal GMX experience. As for the German error messages, we are currently working on fixing this phenomenon.

Another concern was the support. Our reviewer reached out to you guys by email in regards to a few problems he was experiencing, but he never heard back. What is your take on this?
First and foremost, we apologize for any miscommunication that may have occurred. GMX provides tech support via email and a user forum to ensure that all of our users across the globe can contact us. This being said, our Support Team handles any emails and forum postings as efficiently as possible in the order they are received. As we grow along with our user base though, we also plan to expand resources that are available to our customers.

How are your 11 million users distributed worldwide? How many are GMX.de/.net-users versus GMX.com-users?
Our user base continues to grow day by day in each of our markets and actually totals 11 million users to date. GMX originated in Germany, where our headquarters are, and continues to take the lead as our largest market. In 1999, we launched our first-class e-mail service for users in Austria and Switzerland with gmx.at and gmx.ch e-mail addresses. However, the number of GMX users in other countries is currently small in number as GMX launched in the english speaking markets in early 2007. But over the course of this year, the number of GMX users in the U.S., Great Britain, Spain and France – both started in 2009 – have experienced exceptional growth.

What is the single best feature in GMX?
The main goal for GMX is to provide our users with a variety of unique features alongside the webmail component. That’s why we make it a priority to develop applications like 1 GB of file storage, a Mail collector to manage several inboxes at once, an organizer, address book and, most recently, Facebook Connect which lets users link right into Facebook from their e-mail. So while GMX is best known for its reliable and state-of-the art webmail, the overall service has a lot to offer its users.

You seem to be going after the same users as Gmail, MSN Live (Hotmail) and Yahoo. This is a very crowded space. What is your strategy to steal market share?
There are a variety of webmail providers out there, and each one brings different elements to the table. It’s not so much a matter of ‘stealing’ market space as it is developing a reliable e-mail service that provides a variety of improved, well-developed applications, all at the users’ fingertips. We are improving what is already available and making it as user friendly and accessible as possible – as we call it the ‘freemail you’ve been waiting for.’ GMX is the dependable webmail service that people purposely sign up for rather than an e-mail people get ‘just because.’

You recently added support for Facebook Connect as an authentication method. How has the user adoption of this feature been? In percentage, how many of your users login using this method?
Our recent launch of Facebook Connect has been a huge hit with our users. We knew social media has been a huge phenomenon and is now a mainstay in people’s daily lives, much like e-mail has become. It made sense for GMX to offer Facebook Connect. Based on feedback from our GMX users, we know that there is a strong desire to link these two separate ‘online worlds’, and Facebook Connect lets us bring them one step closer to finally closing this gap. Now, our users really have a ‘one-stop-shop’ for staying in touch and managing their e-mail. We’ve seen a steady flow of positive feedback from a large number of our users, too.

Do you offer any way for users to migrate their old emails to your service when they switch?
Every GMX account has a Mail Collector. This lets users manage their other e-mail accounts in their GMX inbox so they don’t have to worry about deleting accounts and losing important information. Instead, they can feed their other inboxes into GMX and continue using them without having to log in to each one separately. This means that GMX users can reply from their other e-mail accounts directly from their GMX mailbox as well.

You offer 1GB file storage. This puts you in direct competition with online storage companies like Dropbox. They offer a desktop application for accessing the files. Is this something you have plans to build too?
Because GMX offers their file storage directly within the webmail interface, a completely separate application just for file access is not quite a top priority at this time. Currently though, our users can create a back-up drive on their desktop. The GMX File Storage Manager lets a person’s PC and File Storage drive exchange data via the Internet so the contents mirror each other. Users can then open and edit the files remotely just as if they opened them from their computer.

Like many modern companies, you have an online Brainstorming tool to help your users suggest and vote on new ideas. What are some ideas that you’ve implemented based on user feedback from this tool?
We’ve received a variety of good ideas from GMX users since we’ve implemented the Brainstorm tool. One of the popular topics was to set up Opera compatibility for GMX. The ‘Remember Me’ feature for user passwords was a successful suggestion as well. Providing other language options and adding a pop-up window before deleting an unsent e-mail are a few other ideas that have come from the users themselves.

You offer a feature called ‘Mail Collector,’ which allows you to send and receive messages from multiple external accounts. How do you do the fetching for accounts that does not support IMAP or POP3 (e.g. Hotmail)?
As this deals with the infrastructure of GMX operations, please understand that we prefer not to discuss this publicly.

On the same topic, when sending mail from an external account, do you send it from the external accounts’ SMTP server? If not, how do you deal with receiving servers that uses SPF?
All e-mails are sent through our servers that support SPF. The SMTP protocol allows us to define a From address as well as an additional Sender e-mail address. The user’s GMX address is used to authenticate the e-mail and avoid spam. But most e-mail tools will show the other address so the recipient will see the other account’s e-mail address.

What Email server are you guys running behind the scenes?
Our data centers house top-of-the-line equipment in an extremely secure environment. The U.S. data center, for example, houses 40,000 servers with 30 Gigabit connectivity. These are highly redundant systems in order to prevent data traffic jams.

Editor’s note: This really doesn’t answer the question. All we know is that the IDENT string for imap.gmx.com is GMX IMAP4 StreamProxy ready and the CAPABILITY reply is CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 IDLE AUTH=LOGIN STARTTLS, so we can only guess.

Where are your servers hosted?
GMX services are hosted in state-of-the-art data centers in Europe and the United States to make sure that our users experience optimal performance. Our computer centers are in Karlsruhe, Germany for European markets and since early 2008, in Lenexa, Kansas for our U.S. customers. Both of our data centers are green and operate in an environmentally friendly manner as well, using electrical power from renewable sources and energy saving software and hardware.

What are you guys working on right now? What can we expect to see from GMX within the next six months?
We are currently further developing our product and have different features in mind that we are working on. Our experience has been very positive in terms of getting new ideas for features and improvements out of our User Forum. This is an open forum where any of our users can suggest ideas and vote on them so GMX is constantly working on developing new concepts.

At the moment, we are working on a few features that will utilize the connection users have between GMX and Facebook even more. The current projects will be quite helpful to our customers and improve their GMX experience. In the end, we make it a top priority to listen to our users and develop their best ideas into a reality.

No interview is complete without a question about Cloud Computing. What is GMX’s cloud strategy?
As e-mail has been one of the first broadly used cloud applications, we consider ourselves a pioneer of cloud strategy.  Additionally, we provide features like our file storage that enables people to save their files in a ‘web cloud’ and not just locally on their desktop computer.  And as we have shown by implementing Facebook Connect, we are currently in the process of bundling other activities from users’ daily online lifestyles into the GMX Mailbox.  We plan to further continue our efforts to get other cloud applications integrated into the GMX service.